The sun is shining, the weather is clear and bright, and yet your flight today has been canceled. While you shake your fist at the cloudless sky, here’s the reason why there’s been an uptick in canceled American Airlines flights recently, as well as the potential for more cancellations in the future: American Airlines’ parent company AMR is having a tough time dealing with its pilots and as such, many pilots have allegedly been calling in sick.

It can be frustrating enough for passengers stranded on a flight that’s sitting on the tarmac at an airport, but even pilots lose their patience when no one will tell them what in the heck is going on. An American Airlines pilot lost his cool with the control tower at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport yesterday after terror threats delayed his airplane and another and communication basically broke down.

Robin flew on American Airlines from Las Vegas to New York over the weekend, and he had the audacity to expect that airlines operate on something resembling normal-person time. If someone told you, a normal person, that they would make a decision in “a little while,” how long would you assume it would be? How about four hours? That’s how long a “little while” was when airline staff were eciding whether to let Robin’s delayed plane go due to weather.

Remember the movie “Office Space,” where the conspiring co-workers wrote wrote a banking program to take a fraction of a cent here, a fraction of a cent there until they amassed a small fortune? Some employees of Sky Chef, the catering contractor for American Airlines, did that at New York’s JFK Airport. Except instead of a massive ill-gotten fortune, the 18 current and former truck drivers ended up with hundreds of thousands of tiny liquor bottles. Which they sold, instead of just having a few really amazing parties.

UPDATE: American Airlines has issued a full statement to Consumerist on this story. It has been added to the end of the post.
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American Airlines says the reason it refused to allow boarding to a 16-year-old with Down syndrome and his parents is that the teen was behaving erratically. The parents say that’s completely untrue and that the airline simply didn’t want their son in first class.

Sometimes you’re grumpy, sometimes you’re tired or sometimes you just don’t want to have to talk to anyone at the airport. If you’re all about avoiding human interaction at the airport, prepare to be excited for the future, where there will likely be a lot less facetime as many airlines are trying out new self-service bag tagging kiosks and automated boarding systems.

Consumerist reader Liz says she’s usually the kind of traveler where everything that could possibly go wrong does — lost luggage, no pilot for a plane, bumped holiday flights, the works — so when she had the Very Best Most Awesomest Travel Experience ever last week, she felt compelled to write in and give both U.S. Airways and American Airlines their props.

It’s not hard to believe that some fliers, sick of waiting at the baggage carousel for their luggage and then hauling it out through the airport and to their destination, might be willing to pay to have someone else do the schlepping for them. Now, American Airlines is hoping that enough people are willing to pay at least $29.95 for a service that just does just that.

The good news is some very discerning minds have gone ahead and done the hard work of assembling a list of airlines that serve free alcohol on in economy class. The bad news is that you’re mostly out of luck when it comes to flights in the U.S. Sigh.

Bankrupt American Airlines has flirted with a few options for mergers in the past, and now it’s being reported that its pool of suitors has grown to at least five potential hookups: US Airways, JetBlue, Alaska Air, Frontier Airlines and Virgin America. Its parent company AMR said it will be moving ahead on evaluating potential mergers and will be in touch with those interested, in order to soothe some of its creditors who aren’t so happy with a stand-alone restructuring plan.